George Orwell Omnibus Quotes

“I am twelve years old and have had over four hundred children. Such is the natural life of a pig.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well—better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?”
― George Orwell, George Orwell Premium Collection: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - Animal Farm - Burmese Days - Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Homage to Catalonia - The Road to Wigan Pier and Over 50 Amazing Novels, Non-Fiction Books and Essays

“In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the 'classical' English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, 'Oh, but that's OLD!' and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to SELL Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are 'always meaning to' read,”
― George Orwell, George Orwell Premium Collection: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - Animal Farm - Burmese Days - Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Homage to Catalonia - The Road to Wigan Pier and Over 50 Amazing Novels, Non-Fiction Books and Essays

“A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons,”
― George Orwell, George Orwell Premium Collection: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - Animal Farm - Burmese Days - Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Homage to Catalonia - The Road to Wigan Pier and Over 50 Amazing Novels, Non-Fiction Books and Essays

“Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, 'mass sadism', the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.”
― George Orwell, George Orwell Premium Collection: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - Animal Farm - Burmese Days - Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Homage to Catalonia - The Road to Wigan Pier and Over 50 Amazing Novels, Non-Fiction Books and Essays

“It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant–it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery–and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided.”
― George Orwell, George Orwell Premium Collection: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - Animal Farm - Burmese Days - Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Homage to Catalonia - The Road to Wigan Pier and Over 50 Amazing Novels, Non-Fiction Books and Essays

“Whatever thought you think there’s always a million people thinking it at the same moment.”
― George Orwell, The Penguin Complete Novels of George Orwell

“could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“real eyes realize real lies... so never change your vibe<3”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell: Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell

“Spectacles are queerly expressive things-almost more expressive, indeed, than eyes.”
― George Orwell, George Orwell Premium Collection: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) - Animal Farm - Burmese Days - Keep the Aspidistra Flying - Homage to Catalonia - The Road to Wigan Pier and Over 50 Amazing Novels, Non-Fiction Books and Essays

“It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“But they didn’t move out of my mind. Still the vision of the coloured shirts and the machine-guns rattling. The last thing I remember wondering before I fell asleep was why the hell a chap like me should care.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“Poetry! What is it? Just a voice, a bit of an eddy in the air. And Gosh! what use would that be against machine-guns?”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“When he tells you how delighted we all are to have Mr So-and-so on the platform tonight, you can see that he believes it. I never look at him without thinking that he’s probably a virgin.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“When a woman’s bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect — which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“Still, if you gave me the choice of having any woman you care to name, but I mean ANY woman, or catching a ten-pound carp, the carp would win every time.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“Killing things — that’s about as near to poetry as a boy gets.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“When I think of Mother’s kitchen, with the stone floor and the beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I always seem to hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin, and also old Nailer, who carried a pretty powerful smell of dog. And God knows there are worse smells and sounds. Which would you sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“But in reality she lived her life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the average zenana.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“It was typical London beer, sickly and yet leaving a chemical after-taste.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“The vivid phrase that sticks and rankles, the neat little para. that packs a world of lies into a hundred words — they came to him almost unsought.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“To turn into the typical little bowler-hatted sneak — Strube’s ‘little man’— the little docile cit who slips home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears, half an hour’s listening-in to the B. B. C. Symphony Concert, and then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife ‘feels in the mood’!”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“He could put up with this meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“That was what his schoolmasters had done for him; they had rubbed it into him that he was a seditious little nuisance and not likely to ‘succeed’ in life.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“was great fun. Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“His father, especially, was the kind of father you couldn’t help being ashamed of; a cadaverous, despondent man, with a bad stoop, his clothes dismally shabby and hopelessly out of date.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell

“was no longer a thing that he created, it was merely a nightmare with which he struggled.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Novels of George Orwell